We’d heard about computer programming, of course, but never suspected it was something kids could do. But BASIC? Holy crap. It seemed practically self-explanatory—commands like IF and THEN let ...

It features all the good bits of BASIC such as GOTO and GOSUB commands, that fancier languages kind of look down upon. It’s also got enough built-in routines to handle regular programming life ...

Case in point: Vision BASIC is a customized, special version of the BASIC programming language with ... There are new commands, including ALLMOBS for setting up all sprites with a single command ...

Typing the command “RUN” would start ... still a fundamental tool in teaching computer programming. One student who later benefited from BASIC was Bill Gates, who used a variation of it ...

That's when mathematicians John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz successfully ran the first program written in their newly developed BASIC (Beginner's All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code ...